Talk:Donner Summit
Oh, God. Do the aliens eat the humans or the do the humans eat the aliens? I bet it's the latter (assuming anyone gets eaten); an inversion of "To Serve Man" is definitely something HT would do. TR 22:43, May 8, 2012 (UTC) The story describes the rigour in selecting the best human representative and described Louise Donner as "if she wasn't perfect in every way, you couldn't prove it" while Pahk Tschapp is matched with "as tasty a specimen of his species". ML4E 22:50, May 8, 2012 (UTC) :I'll bet Pahk brought "How to Cook For Forty Humans" along. :It's definitely leading to eating? It sounds interesting so far. Sublight starships and cryogenic hibernation is of course IFiMT fodder, assuming we ever got that damned thing straightened out. Turtle Fan 04:03, May 9, 2012 (UTC) I hope the Louise Donner article explains all. It is spolier tagged if you want to read the story first. IFiMT? ML4E 20:11, May 10, 2012 (UTC) :Geez, way to put our best foot forward there, Louise. And even assuming that one should not expect a diplomat to refrain from such appalling behavior, since when does a living animal smell the same way it tastes once it's butchered and cooked? ::The story doesn't indicate she cooked him, only that she hit him with a chair and then began to eat; sashimi style or maybe pork tartar since Fofogos are described looking like Porky Pig. However, no indication that she had a knife either so I assume she just started gnawing on him after killing him. ML4E 20:40, May 11, 2012 (UTC) :::How dignified. I know it's just supposed to be a fun little story leading up to a silly ending, but I get annoyed when the payoff of a story is someone doing something obviously ridiculous when they should know better. Turtle Fan 00:36, May 12, 2012 (UTC) ::True. In the story the impression it leaves is the smell (or maybe aroma is a better word) was so great that the individual can't help themselves even if they obviously know better. Hence, the stinger at the end where the aliens give up star travel while the narrator is unsure of the humans. ML4E 16:33, May 12, 2012 (UTC) :I was just thinking that IFiMT might apply because it's got starships traveling at sublight speeds and characters in suspended animation. In that it's quite close to the Race's Conquest and Colonization Fleets as well as the Admiral Peary, where the dynamic is a bit more relevant since the viewpoint characters are thinking about their interstellar mission and its effect on the homeworld in a way that feels far more present than it ever did coming from Atvar. Turtle Fan 20:56, May 10, 2012 (UTC) ::Okay, I thought you were referring to the World War series but I still don't get what IFiMT stands for. ML4E 20:40, May 11, 2012 (UTC) :::Ideas Found In Multiple Turtledove Timelines. I suppose it should be IFiMTT, but somewhere along the line we started referring to it as Ideas Found in Multiple Timelines. In fact, I was a bit surprised when the autofill threw "Turtledove" in there. :::We were planning some sort of reorganization, and we declared a moratorium on new entries till we'd worked out whatever it was we were going to do, but then we never did it. I know this was not much less than a year ago, if not even farther back; the moratorium was already in place last summer because I remember both TR and I suggesting a few entries based on TBS but not making them. Turtle Fan 00:36, May 12, 2012 (UTC) ::D'oh. I was so fixated on story and series titles I didn't twig it was an article title. I'm not sure its worth putting in since there are only so many ways you can do manned star travel. In addition to hibernation, there is generation ships where the great grand-kids of the initial crew reach the destination and relativistic time-dilation for near lightspeed travel are common in SF. I don't think it is distinctive to Turtledove. ML4E 16:33, May 12, 2012 (UTC) :::No, I suppose not. Personally I prefer stories where the ships travel much faster than light and get where they're going in a reasonable amount of time from their own perspective and that of the people on the planets they're zipping between. I don't care whether it's through propulsion like a Star Trek ship's warp engine, or extradimensional manipulation, like the space folding of the Guild Navigators in Dune. I know that brand of SF is considered much softer (though Michio Kaku believes that effective FTL travel on the latter model is a theoretical possibility that would fall well within the technical capabilities of a civilization which was already present in many solar systems). HT seems leery of playing with this; he's done a few FTL stories, but of the ones I can think of offhand, they all have in-text nods to the idea that this shouldn't be happening. Well, except "Trantor Falls," but in that one he had to play by the rules of a universe Asimov had established decades earlier. Turtle Fan 08:01, May 13, 2012 (UTC) "To Serve Man" As far as I can see, the Lit. Comm. about "To Serve Man" added here by Matthew and some other articles for "Donner Summit" is pure speculation on his part and should be removed. This particular comment admits as much since it says HT never said that such a link exists. ML4E (talk) 21:59, October 3, 2019 (UTC) :We should remove it. We should also find a way to discourage MBS from pulling this shit. Turtle Fan (talk) 22:40, October 3, 2019 (UTC)